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How to Use the Planning Board

Deciding which initiatives to include in your future product releases can be a difficult process. With the Planning Board the prioritization process is now easier, more productive, and more transparent.

Based on product management best practices, the Planning Board helps you and your team objectively score opportunities to decide what to include on the roadmap. Most importantly, the Planning Board can help guide your product strategy discussions and help you get buy-in from key stakeholders.

Each roadmap has a unique Planning Board. You prioritize opportunities based on a customized set of Benefit and Cost categories. ProductPlan then scores and ranks each opportunity based on the relative weighting of each category.

Using the Planning Board

To begin, select items from the Parking Lot or Roadmap that you want to evaluate. Filtering makes it easy to select individual items or an entire group of items to score.

Next, you can decide to modify, add or delete columns in the Benefit and Cost Categories. They are customizable to suit your needs.

The Planning Board uses a scale of 1-5 to rank each opportunity in a category. One (1) is low Benefit or low Cost. Five (5) is high Benefit or high Cost.

The total score and rank is a composite of Benefit versus Cost and takes into account each column’s weighting. An item with 5’s on the Benefit side and 1’s on the Cost side will calculate the maximum score. You can adjust the weighting of each column to the number of your choosing.

Example Scoring

In the example below, the first item “New Admin Console” has a score of 72 out of a maximum of 120 calculated in the following way:
In the Benefit section, the first column’s score is 1, so that gets 20% of the 20 possible points (4 points). The second column score is 4, so that gets 80% of the 20 possible points (16 points). The third column score is 2, so that gets 40% of the 20 possible points (8 points).

In the Cost section, remember that a low number affects the score positively (reverse of the Benefit calculation). In the first Cost column the score is 2, so that gets 80% of the 20 possible points (16). The second column score is 4, so that gets 40% of the 20 possible points (8 points). The third column score is 1, so that gets the maximum of the 20 possible points (20 points).

Adding up the points (4,16,8,16,8,20) you get a score of 72.

Whether an item exists on the Roadmap or on the Parking Lot is denoted by the icon to it’s left. To move a Parking Lot item onto the Roadmap, you can drag and drop it from the Actions column to the right of the Planning Board.

Once you have a score for each item, you can have an objective discussion with the team about what to include on the product roadmap.